USA TODAY Review

‘Very Clean Tramp’ chronicles Richard Hell’s passionate life

Richard Hell brings to his new autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, more literary experience than your typical rock memoirist.

Before gaining attention for his work in such seminal punk-era bands as Television, the Heartbreakers and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, he wrote verse and even published a poetry magazine (albeit a "fetal" one, he admits in these pages); and writing has been Hell's main vocation — essays, reportage, fiction — since he retired from music back in 1984.

Tramp, which traces Hell's life up to that point, emphasizes the role that scribes such as Dylan Thomas and William Carlos Williams played in shaping his artistic approach. There are additional references to varied creative types whom Hell, now 62, took in while immersing himself in the downtown Manhattan cultural scene of the early to mid-'70s, where his and other bands thrived.

Still, this book is as pure an homage to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll — and a warning of their implicit risks — as any you're likely to read, served with all the earthy irreverence that fans of Hell's recordings would expect. Born Richard Meyers in Lexington, Ky., to academics who had met at Columbia University, Hell was a curious boy by nature, but less interested in his studies than the Kinks and getting high on codeine-spiked cough syrup.

His interest in mood-enhancing substances increased dramatically in New York, as did his adventures with the opposite sex. Some of Tramp's most entertaining and provocative passages focus on the numerous women who were happy to accommodate a good-looking, rising musician like Hell any way they could. While remembering girlfriends affectionately, he describes groupies with a mix of scorn and unabashed narcissism, calling some "humanitarian benefactors" while dismissing others as "deluded manipulators."

He is similarly colorful, and blunt, describing platonic relationships with women and men — from Patti Smith (who chronicled roughly the same scene and era in part of her own recent memoir, Just Kids) to his old friend and collaborator (in Television and the earlier outfit Neon Boys) Tom Verlaine, by turns a fellow spirit and a rival, a subject of admiration and frustration.

In Tramp's epilogue, as poignant as anything that precedes it, Hell — who still lives in New York but now leads a more settled life, presumably, with his second wife — runs into Verlaine years later in a used-book shop, and their tense rapport comes rushing back: "We were like two monsters confiding, but that wasn't what shocked me," Hell writes. "It was that my feeling was love."

It's a fitting close for a book that ultimately celebrates passion, in all its complicated, sometimes dangerous forms.

Reader Reviews - From Goodreads

Showing 1-5

Comments

Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "X" button in the top right corner of each comment to report abuse. Read more